GEN708 Ethical living, that is, living in the image of God, entails the enhancement of God’s word, God’s world, and the divine image implanted within each human person.  Unethical acts, in contrast, not only diminish God’s world, God’s word and the divine image implanted within each human being, but they also diminish God.  For example, a midrash states: Scripture tells us that whosoever spills blood, Scripture imputes it to him as if he has diminished the image of the King [i.e., God]. The matter is comparable to a king of flesh and blood who entered a city and erected icons and images and stamped coins [with his image upon them]. After a time, they pushed down the icons, smashed the images and destroyed the coins, and thereby diminished the image of the King.  Therefore, whosoever spills blood, Scripture imputes to him as if he had diminished the image of the King, as it is written, “whosoever sheds human blood … for in the image of God, God made humans. [this verse]. Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, sec. “Yitro,” chap. 8, 233 on Exod. 20:16; see also Genesis Rabbah, chap. 34, sec. 14].   From this text, one can elicit at least four theological assumptions endemic to Jewish ethics: (1) God exists; (2) the human being is created in God’s image; (3) because the human being is created in God’s image, certain actions against another person—in this case, murder, are morally wrong; and (4) because human beings are created in the image of God, an immoral act against another person is an affront to God, an act both against God’s will and against God’s person.  The boundaries of these assumptions were expanded by the Jewish mystics of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-centuries.  These mystics maintained that not only is the human person created in the image of God, but that within each person there is an element of divinity, a part of God (helek elohah mi-ma’al), a spark of the divine.  Hence, one ought to treat other human beings in a certain manner not simply because each person is in the divine image, but because God is a part of each person.  In this view, how we relate to other human persons does not merely reflect how we relate to God.  Rather, how we relate to other human persons and to ourselves is how we relate to God.  SHER20C 10